It was kind of a mind fuck to go to Prada. There, ostensibly to view her women’s clothes for Fall, a couple of hundred people waited, crowding and jostling ever closer to an elevator at the new Rem Koolhaas extension to the Prada Foundation. It didn’t come. On reflection, this modern convenience was probably never going to arrive. It took a good 15 minutes for the social experiment to work, for despair to set in, after which there was a collective decision to walk up four floors. And there we took our seats at the edge of an abyss. A brain-fooling black-mirrored floor seemed to fall away to infinity in front of us. Straight ahead through plate glass windows was a dark cityscape illuminated by neon Prada signs—a cartoon flaming heeled shoe, bunches of bananas, a spider, a monkey, a dinosaur. Just before the show, a drone appeared, systematically hovering to record the show and audience reaction, from the outside in.

Troubling, dystopian sci-fi experiences are the fashion sensation of the moment; the point of decadence where immersion in ideas seems to supersede or question the validity of the clothes. Prada’s seemed sketchily put together from hefty utilitarian layers of workwear and tulle, assembled entirely from man-made materials, starting with the company’s black Pocono-nylon padded rainwear.